A Strong Case For Impeachment

Almost eight years ago, a band of hot-headed, half-witted extremists in the House and Senate led primarily by the now disgraced Tom DeLay, came to the novel conclusion that when a president lies about an extra-marital indiscretion with a woman not his wife, it is grounds for impeachment. Fine. As long as they've set a precedent and lowered the bar to such an embarrassing degree, let's have a little peek into the case of George W. Bush, shall we?

Here's what we now know: The Central Intelligence Agency did, in fact, have evidence that Saddam Hussein had the means to develop chemical weapons, no question about it. State secret? Hardly. I knew he had the means to do so! You knew it too if you were paying attention. How? Because the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had stupidly supplied the Butcher of Baghdad with anthrax in the eighties! This was after he had used chemical agents to massacre thousands of Kurdish men, women and little children in Northern Iraq in 1985. How's that for a self-defeating foreign policy?

The question was not whether he had the capacity; The big question was whether or not the anthrax, in question, was still viable. After eight years or so, the potency of anthrax diminishes considerably and there was no evidence that he had tried to acquire any since - and please bear in mind that almost twenty years had passed. While the CIA may have had a small bit of inconclusive, unsubstantiated proof that Saddam had tried to get hold of chemical and nuclear weapons (documents from Niger that were obvious forgeries, for example), they had a mountain of evidence that he had not! That was the evidence that George W. Bush and the tidal wave of ignorance and incompetence that comprises his administration chose to ignore.

In January of 2003, before a joint session of the House of Representatives and two months prior to the stupidest foreign policy blunder in United States history, George W. Bush gave his State of the Union address. By now we all know the famous "sixteen words" by heart. He stood before the American people and said, without even a hint of shame:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa".

Thank goodness for speech writers, huh? Can you even imagine, in your wildest dreams, the First Fool coming up with so clear and literate a sentence extemporaneously? The only problem with that little quote is the fact that it was not just an incorrect statement; It was a bald-faced lie. The CIA, the State Department and the White House had known for months that the Niger/yellow-cake uranium story was bogus. In 2002, with the full knowledge of Dick Cheney's office, they sent Ambassador, Joseph Wilson, a team player from the pathetic administration of King George the First to Africa to check out the facts and he returned with a full report - a report that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld didn't want to hear: Saddam had made no such attempt. The forged signature on the document that claimed the attempt to obtain the dreaded substance was that of a Nigerian official who had been out of government for almost ten years. Inexplicably, it had been cooked up in the Italian embassy. Saddam had long ago, under the first president Bush and Bill Clinton, been rendered a fangless cobra. And we now know what happened after Wilson bravely stood up and exposed the administration's lies - they went after his wife! Whoa! What a bunch of tough guys, huh?

A month after the occupation began, when it became obvious to everyone that no WMD existed, they changed, as if by magic, the original intent of the invasion. It really wasn't about weapons of mass destruction after all. It was about freedom! Yeah! That's the ticket! Bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people! Hmm. Call it a hunch but I don't think that an administration that stole two elections in its own country gives a damn about freedom for Iraqis or anyone else for that matter. The really depressing thing is the fact that so many Americans foolishly swallowed this nonsense, hook, line and stinker. If twenty years of Viet Nam, Watergate and Iran Contra taught them anything, it should have been to be cynical towards anything their elected representatives try to sell them. When the dust is finally settled and the many criminal investigations against the most overtly criminal presidency in the history of the American republic are complete, the motivation for this war will be perfectly clear: OIL. To believe otherwise is to deceive oneself.

What was the result of the lie that William Jefferson Clinton told? A year long impeachment process which never should have happened in the first place that virtually crippled the executive branch of the government.

What have been the results of the lies, too numerous to detail, of George Walker Bush? Almost twenty-six hundred American youth and well over one hundred thousand Iraqi citizens have been needlessly slaughtered. In spite of the administration's denials to the contrary, Iraq is in the midst of a full-blown civil war and the entire region has been utterly destabilized. Experts on the subject of Iraq's history of tribal and religious violence who tried to warn the Bush Mob that just such a sectarian incursion would occur and the possible cause and effect an invasion would have with regard to surrounding countries (Bob Herbert of the New York Times, for instance), were arrogantly dismissed as left-wing extremists. As Richard Clarke, in his book "Against All Enemies" bluntly opined: "Trust me on this one: They haven't thought this thing through".

This little ditty of mine has only dealt with foreign affairs. Need I remind you of Bush's domestic crimes? Spying on the phone calls of American citizens without a court ordered warrant? Looting our economy? The subversion of the constitution? That's not to mention all of those so-called "signing statements" which gave him the right (at least in the minds of he and Alberto Gonzalez) to disregard the very laws he has vowed to "faithfully execute". Oh, this gets ugly, indeed - But it's also too good to be true! George W. Bush will be the first president in American history to go to federal prison. I am as sure of that as I am my own name.

In 1998, the shrill cries for the impeachment of Bill Clinton were everywhere. With the exception of John Conyers of Michigan and Maurice Hinchey of New York - and a handful of others - the possibility of impeaching George W. Bush isn't even considered, let alone discussed. What's wrong with this picture?

Am I missing something here?

Pray for peace.

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY
tomdegan@frontiernet.net